Digital Descent
by Beth Winter
Summary: The Matrix changes, but heroes endure. Crossover featuring Nightwing, ex-Robin - as in Batman And.


SPOILERS: Information revealed in Matrix: Reloaded, but not the exact events, since the timeline's pre-Reloaded.  
  
Disclaimer: Nightwing, the man who was the boy who was Robin, belongs to DC Comics, Bob Kane and whoever. The Matrix, which is not a revelation but a nice world with an impressive gallery of characters, belongs to the Wachowski Brothers, WB and whoever. I only tied them together.  
  
DIGITAL DESCENT  
  
by Beth Winter (renfri@astercity.net)  
  
It is an irreversible rule that after a system is up for long, artifacts will crop up. Unfinished processes, programs in the background, all sorts of things that the programmer never took into account.  
  
And even if you're really good, and really thorough, uninstalling anything will leave a trace. So sometimes people don't even bother; they reboot the system periodically to get rid of artifacts, but they let sleeping programs lie.  
  
And sometimes the programs wake.  
  
The Matrix has had many guardians over the course of its incarnations. It learned one thing: any program intelligent enough to be effective against humans will get a mind of its own. The ex-watchdogs constitute the largest population group among the rogues, from they that once were angels until hit by a stray replication process, to... darker things.  
  
It had been a Matrix full of semi-anomalies in an attempt to contain the One. But even semi-anomalies cannot be controlled by the usual rules. Crime had been rampant, and lives lost. The rebels didn't have to convince people to leave. And so control units were established, and one such unit acquired other units in a process that still remains a mystery.  
  
He was one of the acquisitions. Maybe he had been human once; he did not know. At rest, he sometimes remembered a woman's kind face, and a tent full of faces. Was it a dream?  
  
It did not matter. He was who he was. He stood on the brink of a highrise building and watched the facade of glass in front of him. Highrise, highwise... He watched the shadows move on the glass and knew it would not be long.  
  
She burst out of the glass window like a butterfly from a cocoon. It was a jump, not a fall, but her target site, the scaffolding on the building next to the one he was standing on, was full of workers. Already some faces were distorted and overalls were changing into dark suits. She twisted convulsively in mid-air, managed to push herself back into the void. It was a swan dive now, full of grace but out of control.  
  
He stepped into the air.  
  
This was familiar too, wind in his ears and tears in his eyes. He could have found her hand by touch alone, skin so pale against black leather. Her eyes were wide, astonished. He supposed she had never flown - fallen - in company before.  
  
An arm around her waist, a line wrapped around a balcony, and the fall was very definitely a flight now. She adapted well. She was pliant like a rag doll in his arms, and it was easy to balance her weight in order to make their landing as soft as possible.  
  
They waited there in the street, dark suits and darker glasses. Three of them, and he named them mentally. Jackson, Thompson and Johnson. Curly, Larry and Moe as far as he was concerned; he did not like the FBI air this instance's guardians affected. No style, and wasn't style all that mattered?  
  
Okay, so bullets packed a bit of a punch, though he considered them just as unstylish as the monkey suits. He turned a somersault, pirouetted and kicked the gun out of Thompson's hand, following up with a vicious uppercut to the spine as the agent was snapped around. He went inside the guard of another, and gave him a little something to remember him by: a sharpened emblem of the sort that people used to actually fear, once, seeing it in the sky. He thought about how in this instance of the system, there were stories about it, stories in books full of images.  
  
It did its job; the agent collapsed and a street beggar, half-dead, fell to the pavement.  
  
Only Jackson remained now, and a scream from the woman let him know that he had forgotten something. Oops. Okay, so now he had to think up something to keep the agent from blowing her brains out with that nasty-looking gun pressed into her nose.  
  
Think fast.  
  
Two steps, and a jump high into the air, up to where a shop banner swung in the wind. She was smart, and she proved it again. She used his distraction to get away from the agent, draw her own gun and engage him. Of course running would be smarter, but he had to account for human sentiments.  
  
He jumped down and almost landed on top of Jackson's head. The agent somersaulted back, and launched a lightning-fast series of punches. Flashy and effective, or it would have been if it connected. But he was already cartwheeling down the alley where the woman was hidden, and it was time to get serious. He froze and he waited.  
  
Jackson did not bother with his gun. Perhaps he sensed just how little it would matter, just how easy it was to evade. Or perhaps the agent was just too stupid to use every advantage he had.  
  
It did not matter, not with the staccato of new agents running toward them. Instead of fighting, he wrapped an arm around the woman again. The line made a slight hiss as it shot out, a louder one as it reeled them in and lifted them into the skies.  
  
When they were away, on a rooftop in another part of town, she took a deep breath and spoke for the first time.  
  
"Nice threads," she commented. "What ship are you on, anyway? I'm Nebuchednezzar's. I'll call my operator - have him get us a landline."  
  
He shook his head. "Have them come here."  
  
She looked at him, taking in the black and the blue, and the edges and whirls on what she now saw were not sunglasses. She remembered the time Before, when she walked this ground twenty four hours a day. And the books she read then, as a child.  
  
She made the call.  
  
They followed him through a maze of industrial warehouses and dark tunnels. They fitted the place. Morpheus in a black leather coat so thick, it was a wonder he could move. Neo, in a black Chinese robe that their guide was hard-pressed not to make wisecracks about, looking every bit like every anomaly he had encountered and probably feeling he was as unique as all the others. And Trinity by his side, still in black leather, still breathless from the flight, still remembering half-forgotten stories.  
  
The last door was large and grey, with a black emblem too indistinct for someone in dark sunglasses to recognize in the dark. It opened slowly, without a sound.  
  
They waited for them. Capes and masks moved in the dark, and he remembered once more that even in that first Matrix he had known, this was exceptional. Guardians of the system operated alone, or in professional teams. This...  
  
In the dark, but fragments still flashed. Red hair over silver wheels. Stitched leather that did not show a mouth. Purple, purple and purple again, and a golden cross glinting in the light from a monitor. And black and red and angel wings. Around them, a Chinese puzzle of fragments of memory in bone, cardboard and fabric, all hidden in the dark of the night.  
  
In the middle, on the stairs, a figure larger and darker than the others, the same emblem on his chest.  
  
"Whoa," Neo muttered. "This guy for real?"  
  
Their guide laughed, and it was as if his bounds had been cut. He cartwheeled carelessly over the stairs, stopping at the man's right side, opposite a smaller person in black and green and red. This was home, here, by his mentor's side. He nodded at the boy that would be his brother, and they held back as the man went forth to meet his guests.  
  
Morpheus looked up, and further still. "What do you want?" he asked.  
  
The voice that answered him was as deep as the caves, as dark as the night within the deepest abyss that the Nebuchednezzar ever travelled.  
  
"I want to protect the people. Fight those who would harm them. And find justice, for the dead and for the living. And you require my help."  
  
Above them, dark leathery wings flapped. The bats went forth to hunt their prey, relentless and fearless and without remorse, strong in their numbers. And never, ever giving up.  
  
T4NSM1SSION INTERRUPTD$#~ n o c a r r i e r  
  
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Add commentary? (yes/no) 


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